The Potter's Field: Who Buries the Unclaimed Dead?
A respectable burial was once something you aspired to — not something you assumed. This episode traces how that changed. The stigma of the pauper's funeral turns out to be a modern invention, dating to the shift from inherited status to acquired wealth. We follow the history from Natufian stone graves to Roman puticuli to the Paris Catacombs, then turn to the present: potter's fields like Hart Island, the Jewish obligation of the met mitzvah, and the chevra kadisha's identical white shrouds for rich and poor alike. Along the way we ask whether unburied bodies really cause epidemics — the…
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